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Myth of low wage work
    #12060424 -

I saw this on a web site called lowwagework.org and thought I would post it because I this is an important issue, especially now.  People are conditioned to believe that failure to earn an income adequate enough to cover their basic needs is an individual problem, when in fact it is a societal problem and a political problem.  The entire fact sheet can be found here

MYTH: Low-wage jobs are merely the result of an efficient market and we as a society have little control over this problem.

FACT: Low-wage workers face a world in which they have little power to change their conditions—a result of our creation, not natural law. Over the past quarter century, a variety of political, economic and corporate decisions undercut the bargaining power of the average worker, but especially those in the lower strata of the workforce. Those decisions included the push to increase global trade and open global markets, the increase of immigrant workers into the United States, government efforts to deregulate industries that had been highly unionized, Federal Reserve policies that concentrated on reducing the threats of inflation, and a corporate ideological shift that eliminated the postwar social contract with workers and emphasized a principle of maximizing shareholder value. These decisions contributed to the deterioration in low-wage conditions and a worsening of disparities in income and wealth.

During this same period, the most vulnerable workers were deprived of many of the institutions, laws and political allies that generally helped to counterbalance these forces. In 1950, the number of workers who were fired, harassed, or threatened for trying to organize a union was in the hundreds each year. By 1990, that number exceeded 20,000. Private sector unionization rates plummeted from 25% of the workforce in 1979 to 11% today. The value of the minimum wage fell 30% during the 1980s. Despite legislative increases in 1990 and 1991 and again in 1996 and 1997, the value of the minimum wage in 1999 was still 21% less than in 1979.

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Re: Myth of low wage work [Re: HippieChick8]
    #12060466 -

oh man. when i was working for this huge unnamed corporation(rhymes with hole foods), the big powerful "store team leader"(:rofl:), would make it very common "knowledge" the economy was horrible. he mentioned it every chance he got, and he was completely anti-union(straight nazi). i cant believe they feed that bullshit to workers to make them work harder and fearful of losing their jobs. there must be something fundamentally wrong with the way the economy is structured if people must go to such far lengths as fear tactics to "fix it".


--------------------
Wreck yourself before you check yourself

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Re: Myth of low wage work [Re: burtonRebel]
    #12064759 -

Markets don't control things. That would be as silly as assuming democracies or other large institutions control things. "They", are a label for a collective. A collective rarely remains a democracy for very long. 

Adam Smith made this very clear before going on to promote the concept of a free-market, and went well out of his way to define a free-market as a theoretical model for advancement.




~Monk

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